I fucking love my telephone

I’ve become increasingly less hesitant about buying apps from the App Store. ¥100 is such a tiny drop in the proverbial bucket, and 99 cent apps cost even less than that. I mean, Angry Birds? That’s an easy 6 hours of catatonic joy if you wish it to be. Fucking buy it. Its evil twin, Bad Piggies? Even better; best game for its price ever released. Adventure Time game where you kick Finn in the ass and try to keep him flying through the air as long as you possibly can? Yep, I’ll take that. These are all impulse buys, too – I see the game, think about the price of the game compared to what I spend on fermented barley and hops every week, and my only worry is the space remaining on my phone’s hard disk.

But this month, there was a game whose release I had actually been anticipating, looking forward to for a hell of the longest time, and it wasn’t Star Wars Angry Birds (although that’s a fantastic purchase, too – only 99 cents, god damn it all). Penny Arcade Adventures On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness volume 3 has finally dropped for iOS. This is a wonderful fucking game. You know why? It’s because it’s by Penny Arcade, and those guys are smart. And they’re funny, and virtuous and rich and powerful enough that they don’t have to tolerate substandard, mediocre bullshit in their own ventures just to get it approved for release. They also have a great game production studio behind them, so let’s give some real credit to them: dudes, way to hack apart and rebuild Final Fantasy VI into the sardonic homunculus of Penny Arcade’s grand cross-cosmic vision.

That is not sarcastic praise – I love the idea of making a modern RPG with the once standard SNES look to it. But I’m actually very wary of throwbacks, because they are the easiest thing to fuck up if not treated with care and respect and good aesthetic sense. Without it, you’re just being a cheap bitch using yesterday’s technology, plus you’re trying to feed my sense of the precious and sentimental with straight up dog food, for which I will violate you with a beveled axe handle. Or just not pay you the ¥85 or whatever. But Rain-Slick? You’re cool with me. I really dig your music, your menu controls not as much, but you are fun, funny, an RPG, and on my phone.

Now this trend of recklessly buying shit for said phone does not end at games, and recently I have found myself purchasing e-books for the Amazon Kindle app with alarming abandon. These books are also the chief obstacle keeping me from playing all my new, lovely games. It’s the fucking Ice and Fire series, okay? Game of Thrones? Yes, those books. I only mention them because apparently someone made a video game based on the TV series and it sounds like a big boiled piece of shit unworthy of the brand. I have not played it, don’t plan on playing it, and probably wouldn’t play it anyway unless it was done in Legos. Remember how I said the Penny Arcade guys don’t settle for half-assed shit just so they can stamp their name on it and reap in the sweat, blood, and possibly semen-stained cash of their loyal fans? I think that’s what I said. I just have to ask: Do people really play games just because they’re based on TV shows and movies? Because they are all but required to be the worst. I mean, do you seriously play each fucking Spiderman The Movie The Game that comes slithering out from that great yawning twat of Moviewood? And let me guess: you do some dopey web-slinging tutorial at the beginning of each one? Because that’s what you do with that fucking video game system that you don’t deserve to play?

There are like, games out there, okay? Games based on and created around visions of a what a good game could be. Find them. Unless, and only unless it’s less than 99 cents, you tell Spiderman and his ilk to fuck off and go find yourself a real game, motherfucker. Get on your phone right now and get yourself rain-slicked. And though I can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it the way I do, at least you’ll be able to say you tried not to game like an 11-year old dong.